wear. The hotels, when we asked them, seemed a bit touchy and Just mumbled something. The Ambassador lists them uncertainly as "saques" and prices their laundering as high as $2.50, taking no chances on one's showing up that con- forms to the dictionary's first defini- tion; namely, a long gown of brocade worn in the seventeenth century. We're not going to listen to any more defini- tions; argue it out among yourselves, ladies. In our tour of the hotels, we also gathered other data. The Waldorf changed its list when' it changed sites, but the others seem not to have changed theirs since they opened, and to have taken the word of some old printer for it then. The Waldorf left out sacques, probably realizing for the first time that it no longer knew what they were, but it retained flannel undervests. The laun- dry there has gone along in a pretty up-to-the-minute way except for a sur- prising item a couple of months ago: an old-fashioned pair of lady's drawers with strings that tie in the hack. The Am bassador admits to handling flannel undervests, and the Barclay has one guest who wears flannel nightgowns the year around-slightly lighter ones in the summer. After we had visited all these hotels, we thought of some- thing, and hurried over to the Murray Hill, which we found, as you might expect, gets quite a few interesting . pieces, including fi ve oi six corset- : covers monthly, and woolen union suits. Gentlemen's cuffs-the old detach- able kind, shiny and starched-appear occasionally in the laundry of all the hotels except the Ambassador, which hasn't had a pair for a year and a half now. The Waldorf t gets a paIr every month or so, usually from some Euro- pean guest. Five or six months ago, they laundered two pairs for a gentle- man and lost one , cuff-they're plaguy things to roll un- der tubs. It turn- ed up later. The Commodore has one guest who wears cuffs with white pearl buttons to keep them on. They said he is a "very . . . " promInent CItIzen. The Barclay had an Englishman who al- 14 ways wore them, but he's gone now. Nobody remembered seeing any red- flannel underwear, or any wrappers- everybody puts the latter down under "negligees" now, but the listing still stands. N or is there any recollection anywhere we went of nightcaps, but four of the hotels still list them, for ladies. Ambition A GENTLEMAN arriving at his uptown apartment building in the first small hour of the morning found I...) the night elevator man reading a dic- tionary. He wasn't looking up any- thing, he was just reading it. He said so, holding up the book to sho\v that he was halfway through the "D's." "I don't expect to be an elevator man all my life," he said. Life Savers Y OU'VE probably heard that crack ahout Life Savers-"the fellow who invented Life Savers made a mint." Well, we went into that the other day, and he didn't. His name was Clarence Crane, he was a Cleve- land man ufacturer of chocolates, and he didn't make a mint. He made nine hundred dollars. I t was the people who bought him out who made a mint; the present business, they say, is valued at around twenty million. It centres in Port Chester now, in a neat five- o SEPTEMDER 1". 1 c:> 3 story building, surrounded by green grass and a strong peppermint smell. It is headed by Edward J. Noble, who was the man who saw the possibilities nd leaped at them. Crane, you see, just didn't get it, poor chap. He started to make them one day in a machine in which he made pharmaceutical tablets for Cleveland druggists, which was a sideline to the chocolate business. They sold a little, but not much, partly because he packed them in cardboard tubes resembling cartridges, which were .hard to open. Also, the cardboard absorbed the pep- permin t, so lots of people were disap- pointed. Then Mr. Neble, an adver- tising man, came along in 1 913 and bought the whole thing, formed the Mint Products Company, and began wrapping Life Savers-Mr. Crane had even thought of the name-in alum- inum foil. Noble used the same old machine and had six girls to pack them by hand. Then it spread out. By 1915, the company got a floor at Twentieth Street and Eleventh Ave- nue and added wintergreen. Then they moved to Long Island City and added clove and licorice, and then to Brooklyn. Cinnamon and violet, then. After that they went, in 1920, beside the railroad track in Port Chester. There have been troubles, though. In ] 924, by which time it was Life Savers, Inc., the company branched out and added fruit flavors and came up against a big problem. They had a machine which hammered out the regular mints at a great rate, and under terrific pres- The Last Flower